I speak to quite a few clients who are feeling a bit disenchanted with work. They’re just not feeling the same way about it as they used to and it's impacting their performance and their general sense of satisfaction with life.

By this time, they want out and they want something new, now. That’s fine, but it can mean that you risk going into something that’s not quite right, just because it’s a change.

Unless you are in a very small percentage of the population and very lucky, we largely go to work for the money. But judging by the clients I speak to, people increasingly want more from their careers these days. And why not.

If my coaching conversations generated a word cloud – ‘purpose’ would be by far the biggest one on the screen.

As the job market continues to change and increasingly becomes a ‘buyers' market’ for candidates, I’m seeing clients get more aware of what they want from a role. Or to be more precise, what they don’t want.

They might know their current job is no longer serving them, and want out, but they also want to avoid just jumping to the next thing and finding it's not a great deal better or different. They want to narrow the odds in their favour and become more focused about what sort of role they want.

I was having a clear out recently and came across some old paperwork from one of my first jobs. It got me thinking about how I was in those jobs. There was some good, some bad but it got me wondering how things might have been if I knew then what I know now.